Another Front Porch Success in God’s Country

Invoking the notion of thrift, she set out to persuade towns to compete with one another to become more energy-efficient. She worked with civic leaders to embrace green jobs as a way of shoring up or rescuing their communities. And she spoke with local ministers about “creation care,” the obligation of Christians to act as stewards of the world that God gave them, even creating a sermon bank with talking points they could download.

Relatively little was said about climate.

“I don’t recall us being recruited under a climate change label at all,” said Stacy Huff, an executive for the Coronado Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America, which was enlisted to help the project. Mr. Huff describes himself as “somewhat skeptical” about global warming.

Mr. Huff said the project workers emphasized conservation for future generations when they recruited his group. The message resonated, and the scouts went door to door in low-income neighborhoods to deliver and install weatherization kits.

“It is in our DNA to leave a place better than we found it,” he said.

Leading me to a well worn conclusion: it’s not “climate change” per se (or fill in the blank with almost any pet leftist issue) that arouses opposition from the heartland, but rather it is that these issues are stand-ins for and advanced by command and control methods wielded by the managerial classes operating from a far away centralized power—this is the real issue.

You nailed it with your last point Caleb. The sad reality in some cases however, is that the distaste for the managerialism of the global warming movement leads some (such as my die hard Republican partisan mother) to embrace and give affirmation to unrestrained laissez faire corporate destruction and pollution of the Earth, acting like it doesn’t mattter, or the Earth can take it, or it’s all a hoax…

The entire “Climate Change ” issue, as with most of what passes for conventional wisdom in this profligate, devil-may-care age is firmly politicized and hence immune from productive action. We argue over whether or not puny man can alter his habitat while puny man hoists another bucket of offal over the sinking gunwales of his listing ship.

All common sense evaporated under the idea that Mutual Assured Destruction required that schoolchildren hide under their desks in a drill that became, like life itself, banal.

Glad to see these projects are happening. The enlightened intelligentsia of this country does themselves a great disservice by not understanding and tapping into the values of those in the heartland whose environmental help is crucial.